Just like I was his slut. God, I was turned on again.
I stayed until the credits rolled, the smell of sex clinging to me like perfume.
I was addicted. Because I was his. Because there was no going back.
My father owned me, and I let him.
Because the masked stranger who started it all was the one man I was never supposed to want.
My father.
And God help me, I’d never wanted anyone more.
4
Weeks slipped by in a haze of stolen moments and careful secrecy. The city outside our windows carried on. Holidays blurred into the gray slog of winter, people rushing through their lives oblivious to the quiet, our taboo relationship happening behind the curtains of the place we shared.
At twenty-five, I worked at the diner on the weekends to make my “mad money”, as I called it. But my primary job was working remotely as a graphic designer, which gave me the flexibility to stay home more often than not.
Daddy worked as a senior architect at a firm downtown, but he always came home early if he could. We’d built a rhythm around our lives. In the mornings, we shared intimate conversation over coffee and lingering touches at the kitchen island. Our evenings were shared by curling up on the couch watching old movies. Nighttime the games escalated into something raw and consuming.
But tonight, there was no game. No mask on the nightstand. No anonymous note slipped into my purse.
The rain had turned to sleet, tapping against the windows like impatient fingers.
Daddy sat in the leather armchair as he flipped through an architecture magazine. I was on the rug at his feet, back against his legs, sketching idly on my tablet. It was domestic, almost ordinary… except for the way his free hand rested on my shoulder, thumb tracing slow circles through my sweater.
Occasionally, I’d lean my head against his knee and feel him still for a moment, like he was reminding himself I was really there.
When things were quite like this, I sometimes thought about my mother. She’d left when I was eight, walking out with nothing but a suitcase and a vague response that she had to “leave to find herself.”
And in the years following her departure, there’d been no calls, no cards, and no child support. She was just… gone.
Daddy had picked up every piece, becoming mother and father in one, never once complaining.
I twisted to look up at him, setting my tablet aside. “Do you ever wonder if things would have been different? If she’d stayed?” He knew what I was asking.
His eyes met mine, steady and warm. “Sometimes. But not in the way you think. If she’d stayed, I might never have realized how much I needed you in my life and not just as my daughter I was raising alone but as... this.” He gestured vaguely between us, the words inadequate for what we’d become.
I shifted, moving to sit beside him in the chair, curling into his side like I had a thousand times before. His arm came around me immediately, pulling me close. “It started so innocently,” I murmured, tracing the veins on the back of his hand. “That summer when I was nineteen. The kitchen thing.”
He huffed a soft laugh. “Accidental, my ass. I knew exactly how close I was standing.”
I elbowed him gently. “Liar. You looked like you’d been caught doing something illegal.”
“I felt like it,” he admitted. “I was, sweetheart. You were home from college, all grown up suddenly, and I reached over you for that damn glass... and everything shifted. That brush against your back,” he exhaled. “It was nothing, really. But it felt like everything.”
I remembered it vividly. There had been a spark that had raced up my spine. My breath caught, and a flush crept up my neck. I’d spent the rest of that summer hyperaware of him and of his presence in a room. I noticed the way his eyes followed me when he thought I wasn’t looking.
We’d danced around it for months, polite, awkward distance masking the growing tension.
“Then, during winter break the next year,” I continued softly, “the power outage. Candlelight and that stupid blanket.”
His body was tense, his fingers tracing the back of my hand. “The night we stopped pretending,” he finished. His fingers finally threaded through mine. “I told myself it was wrong a thousand times. You’re my daughter. Society has rules for a reason.”
“But it didn’t feel wrong,” I said, echoing words we’d spoken to each other in the dark many times since. “It felt... inevitable.”
He pressed a kiss to my temple. “It felt right, and that scared the fuck out of me. After your mom left, it was just us against the world. I poured everything into being the parent you needed. But as you grew up... God, Casey, you became this incredible woman right in front of me. Strong, kind, beautiful. And I was terrified of what that meant.”
